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3 years doing ads for the Yellow Pages and DM. This guy has the same conclusion with good examples: http://alistapart.com/articles/whitespace
How sure are you that the relevant quality of the successful ad shown in the link isn't downmarketness but that it's eyecatching? As the author says, the 'upmarket' one is harmonious - which is a really bad quality in an ad. The damn thing needs to grab you! If you can do that and maintain an upmarket, snooty feel, then you have a big win when selling such beauty products. Probably most things, too. Let's hear about…
"Eyecatching" means garish, cluttered, etc. This is not always desirable. Usually it's reserved for wide-spectrum ads for cheap items, hence "downmarket". Audience drives design. If your audience is a few thousand rich wives you'll take the elegant route. If your audience is a million working girls your best response comes from more strident stuff. Since there are so many more working girls versus rich wives, it seems as if all DM is "downmarket". I am sure of this because I've seen the difference even a few changes can make, and I've seen years and years of real-world research on how different styles gather response for different things.
Let's say I'm doing an ad for big copiers. Artsy doesn't work here. You need strong, reassuring. Price isn't listed. Instead you want a couple of pictures, big (local!) phone number, local address, and an IBM-ish logo. IKON, formerly Alco, wanted to establish a trust brand that buyers don't have to think too hard about. So: IKON came out of "I Know One Name".
Now you are selling pizza. Number, types of food, price, delivery options, hours of operation. Closeups of bubbling cheese. Sizzle, not steak.
Cut to the iPhone. Popular yet hip. It's a fine line, and very few orgs can manage it. That's why Apple is the darling of the ad world. They are an outlier.
Another great fine-liner was Grey Poupon mustard. They took the visual cues of the rich, the exclusiveness, the clubby feel un-rich people imagine exists ("But of course!") and placed it right in front of the fact they were flogging mustard for 4 bucks a jar. But once that hook was in and the audience was ok with funny crunchy brown stuff, other fancy mustards went right back to the more familiar downmarket themes of "fun for kids" and "kick it up a notch".
...and so on. Non-commercial (and, frankly, inexperienced) artists tend to make the mistake that ads are not thought about too much or are made by folk who lack taste. Sure, 90% of every profession is crap, but the aim of commercial art is different from Art.